América Latina

Latin America: The tragedy of genetically modified crops and the promise of agroecology

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

29/09/2013

Opinión

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Genetically modified (GM) crops and foods are the subject of intense, and at times furious, debate in the United States. Most of the country’s corn and soy harvests come from GM seed varieties patented by the Monsanto biotechnology corporation, and are used mostly to make food additives, biofuels, and fodder for farm animals. The introduction of these novel products into the US food supply in the 1990’s, without any public debate, notification or hearings, environmental impact statement, or independent safety studies, is causing great concern among an increasing number of consumers.

Biotech corporations claim that their GM crops provide countless benefits for consumers, farmers, the environment and the world’s hungry, including reduced use of pesticides, high yields, and environmentally sound weed and pest management. For the future, they promise crops with increased nutritional content for the hungry in the third world- like the famous “golden” rice-, and “climate-ready” crops that will resist the extreme weather events linked to global climate change. But there are scientists, farmers, activists and citizens that dispute these claims and rosy scenarios (1), and question even whether these foods are safe at all (2), and whether the underlying scientific assumptions of the technology of genetic engineering are valid in light of the most recent developments and discoveries in the fields of genetics and genomics (3).

Last year, California voted on Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling of foods with GM content sold in the state. The measure narrowly lost due to an unscientific fear-mongering campaign funded by the biotech industry and its allies in the food processing sector to the tune of $46 million (4). Later this year, Washington state voters will decide on a similar measure, I-522 (5).

GM crops are no less a controversial and contentious issue in Latin America. South America is the world’s second largest GM crop producer, trailing close behind its northern neighbors, the USA and Canada. All in all, almost all of the world’s GM harvest is in the Western hemisphere, with only five nations taking the lion’s share: the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

According to the biotech industry, GM crops in Latin America are a success story: the farmers have reduced costs and increased revenues, and these exports provide much needed foreign exchange for their countries.

But according to civil society organizations working on the ground, the introduction of GM crops in Latin America has been an unmitigated disaster. In May 2013, 30 members of 12 organizations, convened by the Network for a GM-Free Latin America (RALLT) met in the Colombian city of Bogotá, to share and analyze information on the social and environmental impacts of biotech crops, 17 years after their introduction.

“Far from fulfilling the promises that the companies once made to enter the region, GM crops have planted desolation and death in Latin America”, denounced the meeting’s participants in an open letter addressed to top officials of the United Nations. (6)

“The companies that produce seeds and pesticides and trade GM food together with local elites and in complicity with the government in office have turned Latin America into a maquila of GM crops... The impacts of their activities have been: genetic contamination of agricultural biodiversity, destruction of natural ecosystems, subjecting the population to health problems due to the extensive use of pesticides, close to genocide. Thus, in the Southern Cone, glyphosate resistant soybeans cover an area of 475,700 Km2. This whole area is sprayed with a cocktail of pesticides including glyphosate, affecting millions of people living not only in the main spraying area but also in its buffer zone.”

The signatories emphasize that these impacts are so extreme that they need to be viewed as massive human rights violations.

Most of South America’s GM harvest consists of soy genetically engineered by Monsanto to be resistant to the company’s own Roundup herbicide, whose active ingredient is glyphosate. The overwhelming majority of this soy is exported to China and Europe for use as cattle fodder and as biodiesel for cars. The human health impacts of this agrochemical-intensive farming have been particularly dramatic in Argentina.

In August 2010 Argentina held its First National Encounter of Medics of Fumigated Towns, in which participating scientists, researchers, and academics wrote an open letter to agribusiness trade associations, from which we quote:

The cancers and other severe illnesses are detected with more frequency now. As well as miscarriages, disruptions of fertility and the birth of children with birth malformations, which we find in very elevated rates. And respiratory, endocrine, hematological, neurological and psychic ailments are, also now, much more frequent in the systematically fumigated populations. Fumigated because they share the same geographic space as the agroindustrial and genetically engineered crops that you yourselves exploit.

... We, the doctors and other members of the health teams, the researchers, scientists and academics that analyze this problem, are certain that the increasing health ailments in the inhabitants of the fumigated towns are caused by the fumigations that you yourselves carry out.

The Grupo de Reflexión Rural (GRR), an Argentine NGO that is critical of GM crops and industrial agriculture, has been documenting these horrors for years:

Some time ago, the (GRR) took on the task of collecting information about the impacts of glyphosate on diverse Argentine populations: among other places, in the Ituzaingo neighborhood in Cordoba; Las Petacas, in Santa Fe; in San Lorenzo, also in Santa Fe; and Los Toldos in Buenos Aires. In each of these populations dramatic situations were detected. And precisely in the Ituzaingo neighborhood... over two hundred cancer cases in a population of hardly 5,000 inhabitants, as well as deformations among the newborn. Ituzaingo is a population surrounded by soy fields that are systematically fumigated. The spray from these fumigations arrives at the doors of the houses.

It is not an exaggeration to state that glyphosate’s health effects were covered up for years. In June 2011 an international group of scientists and researchers, organized as Earth Open Source, published a report titled “Roundup and Birth Defects: Is the Public Being Kept in the Dark?”. The document says that as early as the 1980's Monsanto knew that Roundup’s glyphosate caused birth defects in laboratory animals; that the German government had this information at least since 1998; and, to quote from the report's press release:

The German government has known about these findings since at least the 1990s, when as the 'rapporteur' member state (of the European Union) for glyphosate, it reviewed industry's studies for the EU approval of the herbicide. The European Commission has known since at least 2002, when it signed off on glyphosate's approval. But this information was not made public. On the contrary, regulators have consistently misled the public about glyphosate's safety. As recently as last year, the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, BVL, told the Commission there was "no evidence of 'teratogenicity' (ability to cause birth defects) for glyphosate. (Parentheses in original)

There are alternatives to the industrial mode of agriculture, with its toxic agrochemicals and GM crops. And these alternatives can be found in the young science of agroecology. This new field is simultaneously a science, an agricultural practice and a social movement, and began in Central America in the 1970’s and 80’s with the Campesino a Campesino (peasant to peasant) movement. Campesino a Campesino, which has now spread all over the world, is an innovative participatory and horizontal farmer-to-farmer learning method that owes much to liberation theology’s methodology of critical thinking and social action, and to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. It can be thought of as an ecology of the poor, or as a campesino ecology.

“Agroecological methods produce more food on less land, using less energy, less water while enhancing the natural resource base, providing ecological services and lowering outputs of greenhouse gases”, according to a paper by the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA) whose main author is SOCLA president and UC Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri. (7)

The paper, which was presented at the Rio +20 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in Brazil in 2012, cited a 2006 study by the University of Michigan directed by Puerto Rican professor Ivette Perfecto, that compared yields of organic versus conventional agricultural production from a global dataset of 293 examples and arrived at results that were very favorable to organic production. “This means that the global south has the agroecological potential to produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.”

Latin America, possibly the one region of the world that has been the most adversely affected by industrial GM export-oriented agriculture is also a world leader in offering sustainable and ecologically sound farming alternatives.

- Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, investigative journalist and environmental educator. He is a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program and director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety.